Time moves differently when I’m home from college. An hour at home means deciding what to do, watching two Food Network episodes at my grandparents’ house, driving to the beach, or puttering out half-sentences at my computer that I tell myself I’ll finish later. An hour at school means completing a homework assignment, attending a newspaper meeting, reveling in this unusually lengthy chunk of free time, or simply talking with roommates right before bed, making me lose sleep but feel the good tired of a full day. This discrepancy in time is a welcome product of summer and its lazy days of food excess, television and marathon reading (most recently for me, Emma Cline’s The Girls and, of course, the latest Harry Potter). It’s also a product of place. School is an academic environment of…

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Editor’s Note: For the final installment of our Children’s Literature Issue, we have an essay by one of our members, M. J. Sterling. She writes about the agony of anticipation that comes with hoping for parenthood. * * * In Chou on Spruce and Sacramento one crisp November day while the city reverberated with the tap tap tap of keyboards under blue lights in cardboard cubicles, we were two deserters and a stowaway drifting through the jewel box of smocked, pinstriped, hand-knit and starched cotton treasures as through an enchanted forest. Just past three. Nestled on that too beautiful San Francisco street, clear brilliance of red and blue and green skyline — the city paused here in quiet repose. The owlish shopkeeper in giant black glasses and 50’s polka dot scarf peered into her dog-eared…

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[Photo: Manhattan. Which box do you choose?] I want to be a writer. Well, what do you want to write? Novels, short stories, articles? Academic papers, scripts, speeches, songs? English, Italian, Spanish, marketing materials, instructional manuals? I don’t know. Moreover, I don’t want to choose right now. And yet, in declaring a major, in finding summer jobs, in approaching the time when I will no longer have school to define myself by, it feels as though I have to choose—at least momentarily, to shroud that indecisiveness that jitters inside me. In part, my confusion seems to fulfill the generalizations of an English major and perhaps, moreover, a liberal arts student—you do not have a set career path, you will not make much money. Even if you do find that sweet spot of a job, they…

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Why We Write Words flit in and out of our awareness like fish in shoals— many so drab we scarcely pay attention; others teach us or guide us, imbue memory and behavior like computer code. Some few— some few inspire us, change us in subtle and striking ways, play on our minds and emotions like a maestro on a concert grand. These words, by and large, are invisible to the eye. They slip through and resonate, indeed explode, at the deepest levels of our being. Words that matter are the product of disciplined study and practice— hard won. At best— an art. Words that matter are most often composed in solitude over lonely hours. Every serious writer I’d venture yearns to tame the ineffable, express the inexpressible with elegance and beauty. Writers of non-fiction weave…

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